But in spite of these kindly allowances, these gentler rules and directions, the condition of Christians, even for those, and they certainly were in the majority, who followed the teaching of the more kindly and lenient school, was very hard and difficult. In the family life--in public life, the searchings of heart of a true believer must have been often very acute and distressing, and their position most precarious; and in those times when a wave of pagan fanaticism swept over the imperial court, the province, or the city, no maxims of earthly prudence and caution, however carefully followed out, would have been able to save them from prosecution; and prosecution was invariably followed by the breaking up of their homes, by rigorous imprisonment, confiscation of their property, loss of rank and position, too often by torture and death. To turn once more to the sterner and smaller school of “Rigourists,” for these, after all, were “les âmes d’élite” of the Christians in the first three centuries; in later times such men and women possibly were termed fanatics, they have been often branded as wild and unpractical persons; but it was to these heroic souls after all that in great measure Christianity owed its final victory. The wonderful and rapid spread of Christianity noticeable after the Milan toleration Edict of Constantine, A.D. 313, has often been commented upon with surprise. From being a persecuted and despised cult, Christianity became, long before the fourth century had run its course, _the religion_ of the Empire; it had previously gained evidently the hearts of the people in well-nigh all the provinces of the mighty Empire. Now no imperial edicts--no mere favour and patronage of the Emperor and his court, could ever have won for Christianity that widespread and general acceptance among the people so noticeable within fifty years of the Milan proclamation of Constantine.[82] _Something_ more was needed. For a little over two hundred years the Christians had been sowing the seeds of a new and nobler view of life--“it had gradually taught the supreme sanctity of love--it had presented an ideal destined for centuries to draw around it all that was greatest as well as all that was noblest on earth; and one great cause of its success was that it produced more heroic actions and formed more upright men than any other creed.... Noble lives crowned by heroic deaths were the best arguments of the infant Church.”[83]